Best 335 quotes in «sympathy quotes» category

  • By Anonym

    The city is tricky. The highs are so much higher, but in the lows you drop straight down again to bedrock. It helps that streets are snapped to a grid. There are also psychic boutiques and sidewalk prophets, but until you contrive your own love story set in that city, even one as warped as mine, you remain outside it, looking for signals in the white smoke that rises from under, in the sudden hot laundry smells and the LED typos of street vendors donuteasily becomes dount, ominously like don't, to my mind. There was a DOUNT sign on Second Avenue which more than once redirected my superstitious footsteps.

  • By Anonym

    [T]he distance between sympathy and sensuality is as short as that which separates those two words in the dictionary.

    • sympathy quotes
  • By Anonym

    The experience of humanism is that 'nothing human is alien to me'; that I carry within myself all of humanity; that nothing which exists in any human being does not exist in myself. I am the criminal and the saint. I am the child and the adult. I am the man who lived 100000 years ago and the man who will live 100000 years from now.

  • By Anonym

    The death of Robert G. Ingersoll, on July 21, 1899, was one of the most widely -- noted events of that year in the civilized world. It was also one of the most widely and profoundly regretted, -- the most deeply deplored. Everywhere, the wisest knew (and the noblest felt) that the cause of humanity had met its greatest loss. To many thousands who realized the intellectual amplitude, the moral heroism and grandeur, the boundless generosity and sympathy, the tenderness and affection, of this incomparable man, his passing was as an intimate and bitter bereavement. Ingersoll was doubtless known, personally and otherwise, to more people than any other American who had not sat in the presidential chair; and, notwithstanding either the number or the wishes of his critics, his death probably brought genuine grief to more hearts than has that of any other individual in our history. Twice before, 'a Nation bowed and wept'; this time, a people.

  • By Anonym

    The emotional question became why Susy had rejected me. I was interested in that shift, from actively wanting to actively not wanting.

  • By Anonym

    The glow of the steetlamps sat heavy and thick above me. As I walked aimlessly, in the direction of downtown, I returned to my theories. That Mizuko and I shared the pictorial equivalent of DNA. That a sympathetic magic existed between us, no matter how far apart we were pulled. That we defied physical laws of time and space, waves, gravity, the rules laid down by physicists which governed our physical universe (earthquakes, tsunamis) and physical bodies. And yet somehow our connection had led to the opposite of intimacy. My search had led to its opposite. I had never felt so isolated and disconnected, even from myself.

  • By Anonym

    The gut is the seat of all feeling. Polluting the gut not only cripples your immune system, but also destroys your sense of empathy, the ability to identify with other humans. Bad bacteria in the gut creates neurological issues. Autism can be cured by detoxifying the bellies of young children. People who think that feelings come from the heart are wrong. The gut is where you feel the loss of a loved one first. It's where you feel pain and a heavy bulk of your emotions. It's the central base of your entire immune system. If your gut is loaded with negative bacteria, it affects your mind. Your heart is the seat of your conscience. If your mind is corrupted, it affects your conscience. The heart is the Sun. The gut is the Moon. The pineal gland is Neptune, and your brain and nervous system (5 senses) are Mercury. What affects the moon or sun affects the entire universe within. So, if you poison the gut, it affects your entire nervous system, your sense of reasoning, and your senses.

  • By Anonym

    The gut is the seat of all feeling. Polluting the gut not only cripples your immune system, but also destroys your sense of empathy, the ability to identify with other humans.

  • By Anonym

    The heart’s egoism sees itself suffering when it sees another suffering and so it learns sympathy, because it can put itself into another’s place; then the heart comes a little way out of its egoism and tentatively encounters the world. But, before the prospect of its own suffering, the heart melts completely and retreats into egoism, again, to protect itself.

    • sympathy quotes
  • By Anonym

    The idea of people looking at me all sympathetic... I just can't deal with that." "Yep. I hear you," Peggy said. ... "I mean their hearts are in the right place but if you have not been through it then it's impossible to understand. It's like we're in the club or something.

  • By Anonym

    The graveyard is the everlasting home of every man.

  • By Anonym

    The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.

  • By Anonym

    The law of sympathy is one of the most basic parts of magic. It states that the more similar two objects are, the greater the sympathetic link. The greater the link, the more easily they influence each other.

  • By Anonym

    The moral crisis she'd just gone through made her feel indulgent toward the faults, the delinquencies of others. How thoroughly a human being can be buffeted and over-mastered by fate had been borne in upon her with appalling force.

  • By Anonym

    The next time you wish you could find the right words to say to someone who is hurting, just remember that dogs are a man's best friend without ever speaking a word to them. Simply be present and have sympathy.

  • By Anonym

    The family came in to select the arrangements they wanted. The woman whose husband had died was struggling dearly to keep her voice intact long enough to place the order. It wasn't long before she broke down. Wendy didn't say a word. She moved from behind the counter to find a chair for the woman. She eased her into it. She sat beside her and let her cry. Quiet, not speaking. She brought tissues when the moment asked for it. The woman's crying slowly came to a stop. She wiped her eyes, and she looked at Wendy. And she smiled. Just a little one. And she said, "Thank you.

  • By Anonym

    The only thing I hate about good people is that they like making their being good people bad people’s problem.

  • By Anonym

    The pleasure or the benefit that the object of our deed derives from it is every now and then greater or even more important than the one we derive from the deed.

  • By Anonym

    There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another's) situation.

  • By Anonym

    The rejection was bigger than the present moment itself.

  • By Anonym

    There's nothing more debilitating about a disability than the way people treat you over it.

  • By Anonym

    There was an extravagant winter storm outside. The tinfoil sky flashed beyond the window, rattling in the frame, and once or twice a white fork like a vein. Through the opposite window, which looked out onto the other side of the house, the light was pale, picking out where the wall was still broken from the last big storm, with the scorched telegraph pole and the burnt tree.

  • By Anonym

    There are two ways of life, one leading to righteousness, which brings happiness, and the other to unrighteousness, which produces misery. One leads to kindness, mercy and sympathy, the other to hatred and cruelty; one to tolerance and the other to intolerance; one to justice and the other to injustice; one to truth and the other to error; one to peace and concord and the other to quarrelling and war; one to mental development and the other to mental contraction. One is the Secular way and the other is the Theological; one is the Democratic and the other the Despotic; one is the sane and the other the insane.

  • By Anonym

    There was never one truth. Even the Higgs could still be used to prove opposing theories, its mass falling between them on a chart. Besides, I told myself, my breathing heavy, eyes widening until they bulged, I was post-truth.

  • By Anonym

    There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of. In the 1960's, in my home town of Jackson, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered on night in darkness and I wrote a story that same night about the murderer (identity unknown) called "Where Is The Voice Coming From?" But all that absorbed me, though it started as outrage, was the necessity I felt for entering into the mind and inside the skin of a character who could hardly have been more alien or repugnant to me. Trying for my utmost, I wrote in the first person. I was wholly vaunting the prerogative of the short-story writer. It is always vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside another person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose. I'm not sure this story was brought off; and I don't believe that my anger showed me anything about human character that my sympathy and rapport never had.

  • By Anonym

    The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.

  • By Anonym

    The sensation that had plagued me after graduating, of being on the outside of some mystery, peeking in, returned.

  • By Anonym

    There is an outpouring of international sympathy and aid when any area of the world is struck by an earthquake, a flood, or a devastating fire. [...] When we look with justifiable pride at our generous responses to those suffering a natural disaster, we might also pause to reflect on how it happens that our sympathy can be so easily changed to hatred. How is it that we will predictably reach out to help a given people at one time and, when our country labels the same people enemies, we will reluctantly or enthusiastically kill millions of them?

  • By Anonym

    The story she then told was as all attempts at sympathy are: an effort to match in form and size and detail what another has known: to hold one experience next to another the way lovers and children match fingers and hands, as if these two, side by side, are linked by their likeness, are both identical and unique.

  • By Anonym

    The street had that sad summertime feeling that you want to push on to see why it hurts.

    • sympathy quotes
  • By Anonym

    The situation got worse when they came back to her apartment after and someone put on music. An advert interrupted during a moment when I was the person nearest the laptop, and so somebody said to me—quite threateningly, I felt—Put something else on. Obviously I forgot every song I have ever heard in my entire life. In one swift tug, like the tablecloth trick where everything is supposed to remain on the table gone wrong, every name of every artist disappeared too. The only keywords I could think of were the ones on a toy keyboard-and-tape-recorder combo I'd been given as a child, and I hadn't known their meaning even then. Bossa nova, for example. I said I couldn't think of anything, any music, except silence, and retreated to the corner of the room, pretending to busy myself by scouring the bookcase there, which held little gatherings of figurines as well as Mizuko's many books.

  • By Anonym

    They'd smother what was left of her pride in well-meaning sympathy.

  • By Anonym

    Things which had at first felt like signs, if I analysed them for too long, ended up feeling like the movements of my own reflection in dark glass.

  • By Anonym

    This is what differentiates sympathy from empathy. No matter how much I care for you, it's not until I recognize me in you and you in me that the veil of gauze is lifted on the world.

  • By Anonym

    Though I did not know her exact address, that she appeared to live almost within breathing distance of Robin, and that I lived with him, and that her pictures showed that she was now dating the mysterious Rupert Hunter, our despotic mothers, our absent fathers, the borders we had both crossed, all our many parallels and connections at every point, could not be chance. I saw it as evidence of the hidden connections between things, an all-powerful algorithm that sifted through chaos, singling out soulmates.

  • By Anonym

    To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic.

  • By Anonym

    To me, it was clear proof of the existence of supersymmetry, the idea that every particle has a partner. She was mine.

  • By Anonym

    To the rich, the really poor don't know that the level of comfort you experience exist at all, so you see, they don't need your sympathy, and you should not feel guilty, just teach them how to fish.

  • By Anonym

    True devotion and humility is when you carelessly allow yourself to fall in love with things you consider will make you look inferior, which in essence, makes you superior.

  • By Anonym

    Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.

  • By Anonym

    We are not to judge of the feelings of others by what we might feel if in their place. However dark the habitation of the mole to our eyes, yet the animal itself finds the apartment sufficiently lightsome.

    • sympathy quotes
  • By Anonym

    We are, or rather our natural desire to evade pain and to attain pleasure is, the primary reason we do or say every single thing we do or say.

  • By Anonym

    We are sometimes hurt mostly or only not by what happened or is happening to us but by being felt sorry for.

  • By Anonym

    We can never know how much they deserve our sympathy, but we have to give it unreservedly as they are people innately full of the divine who instead choose to behave infernally owing to poor programming.

  • By Anonym

    The sky was always full of birdsong and evening smells, piano music from a window, the stone buildings glowing against the blue, like cream poured over something tart and hot.

  • By Anonym

    The whole time I hadn't slept with anyone at university had made it harder and harder to finally do it. Like spending too long on a very high diving board, until finally you have to exit ignominiously, the same way you climbed up.

  • By Anonym

    They seemed to despise each other, with a kind of loyalty.

    • sympathy quotes
  • By Anonym

    Understanding did not provide solace or make the pain go away; in many ways, understanding was just more salt in the emotional wound. Ignorance allowed one to fight back with unfettered cruelty. Understanding inspired empathy, which led to guilt, as well as suffering. She looked at Gavin, supine, unconcerned, contented, and thought that perhaps there was something to being a sociopath. If you didn't have a heart, it couldn't be broken.

  • By Anonym

    Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad.

  • By Anonym

    Was this what the city would look like when knowledge was no longer enough? When the desire to turn inward, surrendering entirely to one's own private world of nonresistance, overwhelmed, like creeping ivy, our desire to know worlds beyond it?